Standing on the Shoreline
by tofsla
Summary: Snape balances uneasily between worlds. Dresses, books and a little herblore; Autumn 2012 and Winter 2013, Cokeworth. Severus/Harry, Severus/OMCs.
1. Chapter 1

_Story notes: This fic is complete at 20,000 words & will be posted in nine chapters over the next week. Books play a big part in the story, and if you're wondering about any of the references I can tell you that there'll be a complete list of all the (muggle) books read at the end of the final chapter, together with sources for some of the muggle folk traditions I've drawn on._

* * *

Severus puts a cigarette to his lips, takes deep drags that spread a slow, curling warmth through his chest. Hardly as good as a charm, but sufficient. It is a filthy habit, of course, but he finds this to be part of the appeal. Inhaling the smell of smoke is the next best thing to falling into a Pensieve: a sense-memory that swallows him whole, his father's long fingers that curl around a pint-glass, the deeply scratched varnish of the table, felt rather than seen in the dark corner of the pub. The murmuring rise and fall of voices around them, owners indistinct in the haze of smoke. The hard curve of a wooden chair, all the wrong shape, digging into his spine just below the shoulderblades.

There was a time when the bar of the Nelson was an exotic place. Shall we take a trip to the zoo and look at the Muggles, dear?—His mother never could help herself, could she. Although he supposes, in her defence, that it must have been something of a trial to have to fetch one's thoroughly pickled husband from that place an average of five days a week. One may have one's little joke, although a six-year-old may not be the perfect audience.

(And don't you know all about inappropriate audiences, Severus.)

These days there are apparently laws about an amazing variety of things, and he is reduced to attempting to give himself Muggle diseases in the alley behind the pub, beside the fire-exit from the toilets that is not, despite advertisement, alarmed. One arm wrapped tight around himself, elbows tucked in hard to his sides as he smokes, shoulders very straight in defiance of the late October chill and the too-thin fabric of his dress.

* * *

In these surreal Muggle days there are revelations to be had. For example, that opportunities exist, if one is not picky—Severus is not picky, not in this. A man's hand around his cock in a bathroom stall, more rarely the rough press of bodies in the dark corner of an underpass by the train station. There are specific places; one can learn them. It's enough like hurried wartime encounters to let him relax into them, a pattern his body knows, can accept—although there was never very much sex then. There was, after all, too much to lose. But this, here, is perfect.

One need not be socially graceful.

Nor need one ever take off one's clothes.

A half-stranger can say, _oh, fuck, that's good_. Can say, _suck me_, and he can do it or not, counter with his own demands, and it is a game—but it is a small game, no grand scheme behind it all. The stakes are limited to his own person: small calculated risks taken for a small reward. No worlds will fall. In that way it is almost like relaxation, even the uncertainty of it.

It is on these nights, when he haunts meeting-places, that he likes, sometimes, to wear dresses. Something inappropriate, unsuitable. Provocative, certainly. The tips of his lank hair brush against the smooth fabric that covers his shoulders, and he lets them be; his hair may hang how it likes. He will never be graceful, does not dream of it. Has no aspiration to beauty, and not the faintest interest in passing—as if he ever could. But he is—himself. More himself than at any other time, all his peculiarity made explicit. To apply lipstick is an advanced lesson in dark humour, something he indulges in only rarely, an obscene smear of red that turns his mouth into a wound. It is not particularly necessary, either, for his purpose. But dresses place him in between. It is almost like being a part of two worlds at once.

* * *

During the days he brews, distils, infuses. There are many uses for herbs, with or without a wand: henbane for visions, which he does not personally want or need; valerian for sleep, which he does. It would not do, though, to sell potions, despite his visual suitability for the role of hedgewitch. He won't have it, does not touch that sort of thing. There are other ways.

The flowers of St John's Wort are yellow, but infused in alcohol give a deep red colour to the liquid. Wormwood is powerfully bitter and amber yellow, elderflower more delicate. These are traditions from his childhood, not entirely correct here, now, but pleasingly exotic to the British Muggle.

In the damp cellar bottles line the walls, meticulously labelled by hand. Copper pipes curl, gently gleaming, between bulbs full of liquid, some carefully heated, others cool, drops of condensation gathering and sliding along their curves. Strictly speaking they are entirely mundane, but there may perhaps be, on occasion, a certain spillover effect; his magic, unused and as far as possible ignored, crackles in him. Becomes demanding at odd moments. But it is never very much, and he could not stop it if he tried. (He has tried.)

He has nothing like a shop, an official business. Certainly not a license, Muggle or magical. All the same, there are customers. Mrs Baker, one of the few other remaining inhabitants of Spinner's End, is dedicated; she chooses powerful flavours, and doesn't talk a great deal, which he considers a point in her favour. Archibald Linton has proven trustworthy enough to be allowed to keep an open tab. Draco Malfoy placed an order once—by owl, because respecting other people's wishes is apparently less important than being as persistently and irritatingly pure-blooded as possible. Severus does not care to know how he got word, much less what may have prompted him to buy illegal alcohol from the likes of Severus; he is not, though, the only wizard whose name is noted in Severus' ledgers.

* * *

The Gravedigger's Arms is a place for relics. It is not Canal Street or Hurst Street or Vauxhall. It is a dingy pub on the corner of a dingy street, windows dimmed not by design but by neglect. It fits seamlessly into the Cokeworth of Severus' childhood memories in a way that the clubs which cluster on the edge of the city centre, where Westgate meets New Town Road, never can. It appeals to him specifically because it is so entirely unappealing, and also because its regulars are unlikely to balk at a spot of peculiarity.

He himself may be counted a regular, and a pleasingly insignificant one. He may live five streets away, but he is quite perfectly anonymous in all the ways that count. An ageing man with a bad temper, who enjoys sex, even if only in a furtive sort of way that is laced with the stubborn remnants of puritanical guilt. Who might be persuaded to part with a bottle of something or other—really good stuff, you know. But better not ask where it comes from.

It is, finally, after years of internal negotiation, almost comfortable. Predictable, too, in its way—and the comfort of predictability is something Severus has learnt never to underestimate. Among people who know nothing about him he can kneel without bending and fuck without giving any part of himself away. He has every intention of going on like this until he drops dead, or until the pub gets torn down to make way for something new and clean and profitable – whichever happens first. Somewhere there is another world and war trauma that's barely scabbed over. There are parties and grand speeches and elections, again and again and again. There is a school and there is Harry Potter, presumably sweeping all before him. And finally, blessedly, none of it has anything to do with him at all.

* * *

These are the things that Severus is thinking about. It is a Tuesday night, quiet, and he drifts between the bar and the alley, smokes irritably and doesn't know why he is irritable. He is feeling restless, and though he would very much like to get sucked off he rather doubts that tonight is the night. Tomorrow it will be Halloween, and there is magic under his skin, so present that it is strange to look at his own hands and not see it physically represented there, twisting dark below the surface, visible to the barman and the little huddle of men considering the tatty pool table with inexplicable suspicion. He should go home. He may as well climb the walls there as anywhere else, can at least do something with a little of his power, siphon it stealthily off into bottles and jars and let it become something new; not work magic, not as such, but allow for the suggestion of magic. He has almost decided—but he is too slow, ought to have known better than to think about the war, about power. There is a weight to thoughts on days like this; they can shift the world on its axis in peculiar, unpredictable ways. Speak of trolls and they stand in the hall. Name the devil—

When he turns to leave, Harry Potter is standing in the doorway, dressed in scruffy jeans and a faded old t-shirt, a worn brown jacket. He has a bag slung over one shoulder and a puzzled expression on his face.

"Oh," Harry Potter says.

For perhaps a second Severus can do nothing but stare. It cannot be real. Harry Potter in the doorway of a seedy pub in a bad part of Cokeworth. Quite as ridiculous as the idea of Severus Snape in a dress.

"You," Harry Potter says, shockingly soft, a little exclamation of pure astonishment.

Severus collects himself, gathers up all the pieces with deliberate mental effort, wishing, for the first time in years, for his wand. "Me," he says, lets his voice snap a little, sneers. There are some people it is always a pleasure to be sharp with. "What's the matter, Potter? Never seen a man in a dress before?"

Potter does not flush or flinch or draw back. He just says, "Of course I have," mild, one corner of his mouth lifting slightly, and then, as though they were about to shake hands at a Ministry function, "Nice to see you, by the way. It's been a while. Professor."

It's been years. This is the first time since the hearing, since Potter gave his speeches with his mind already moving on to some distant future where there wasn't going to be any war. There will, of course, always be a war.

"Not nearly long enough," Severus snarls. "Of all the—"

The man actually laughs at him. Or—laughs. Potter, Severus is convinced, is meant to hang his thoughts out like banners; he is near-terminally open and devoid of the capacity for successful pretence. It is disconcerting, then, to not know what he is amused by. Let it be Severus—his appearance, his habits, his pathetic damn life. Let it be something that will give an excuse for true vitriol.

"I can't decide," Potter says, finally taking a step forward, letting the door close behind him, "if this is exactly how I thought it would go if we ever ran into each other again or if we're already miles off script. Let me get you a drink or something?"

Certainly, he could let Potter buy him a drink. Reminisce about every awful thing that he's ever done, which ought to take until throwing out time next Saturday. Then maybe Potter will give him that blowjob that he's obviously not getting from anyone else tonight, just to round off the bizarreness of the entire evening.

Severus holds himself very straight, looks down at Potter with all the disdain he can summon. "I can't imagine why you would think I'd accept. Apparently age doesn't bring insight."

He leaves, controlled steps, not a hint of hurry because he is not running away; it is Potter who is the intruder here. He pictures Potter staring after him—imagines that he can feel it, eyes following him—but cannot decide what emotion might be on the man's face, doesn't care to look back and see.

* * *

The house is too quiet, but he cannot very well leave again—thank you, Potter. He should do something. He should—make something. Destroy something. Go out again and fuck someone, to hell with Potter, to hell with hiding away, to hell with magic.

He sits at home and drinks, hunched in his battered armchair, facing the window with its curtains thrown back; watches the silent, abandoned street and slowly wastes the night.

* * *

He feels some resistance to the idea of going to the pub again after that. He doesn't know or care what Potter may have been doing there, doubts he can have found it so thrilling that he'll be making repeat visits, but there's something jarring about the collision of that particular past with this particular present—the feeling of the world having shifted persists. It doesn't matter if he never sees Potter again; Potter has still seen him. Knows.

Severus allows himself Halloween, shuts himself away in his basement and draws on folklore that is not but could easily become magic and, inevitably, remembers. For the rest of the week he deals with his disconcertion aggressively—he will not let Potter dictate the terms of his existence. It is a relief not to be asked about their rather public conversation—which goes to show that having a reputation for being a bastard isn't without its uses. There is only the usual: quiet, empty conversation. Covert eye contact that more accurately conveys intent. The alcohol is still bad.

* * *

"Yours is better," Richard says, on Thursday. "I'll pick some more up tomorrow, OK?" Richard's flatmate apparently thinks it's the best stuff ever, like getting high; absinthe hasn't got shit on it, Severus is told. But this dubious conversation is in itself a cover for the substance of the matter, already known to both of them, which is that Richard enjoys being fucked by men in dresses, for preference bent over a sink so that he can watch in the mirror.

Severus' own preferences run to a definite absence of mirrors, on the whole, and his idea of fucking only rarely involves penetration, especially in a bloody pub toilet. But he has been persuaded once or twice before and, because he has a point to prove to no-one in particular and because he really does rather dislike Richard and that makes it entirely safe, he allows himself to be persuaded again. Muggle condom and Muggle lubricant and Richard's tatty jeans pushed down to his knees, Severus leaning in against him; hair sticking to his face, hands grasping hard at Richard's hips. He is torn between closing his eyes or staring at himself, at his awkwardly skinny chest covered in deep blue synthetic silk—reminding himself again and again of his own unattractiveness, the harsh lines of his body, skirt rucked up around his hips, already ugly face unevenly flushed with effort, perverse arousal. This is still something that someone else can get off to; a bizarre fact, some unaccountable quirk of the universe. But there isn't much time to think about it; most of it is just quick fumbling, get it in and get off before anyone can come in and throw them out. Close to perfect in its messy awkwardness.

* * *

He dislikes Friday nights. There are too many people, too much happening at once. But he makes an exception and, head hazier with alcohol than he usually allows, sucks the cock of a perfect stranger in the darkest corner of the alley behind the Gravedigger's. On his knees, eyes closed, he could be with almost anyone. He doesn't get off that time, though it's enjoyable enough, rough hands in his hair and a thick cock stretching his jaw; but later there's another man in a toilet cubicle who he presses up against the wall and rubs himself off against and never looks in the eye.

He does not think of Potter then—that thought only comes later, accompanies a memory of the events rather than the events themselves, and it is only a hypothetical. Potter who has, of course, seen a man in a dress before. Who, on finding Severus Snape in a meeting-place for gay men, asks if he can buy him a drink.

* * *

But it has to be enough at some point; he is not a person who goes out every night, is certainly too old and too tired to fuck all the time. Saturday is a haze of exhaustion and comes, to his irritation, complete with a mild hangover. He spends the day at his desk, catching up on bookkeeping, making neat notations in heavy, rather un-Muggle volumes that rest on the small clear space in front of his chair, surrounded by unstable mountains of scrap paper, novels, annotated articles which he will never actually use for anything, and the crossword pages pulled from several months' worth of editions of the local paper. Eats as an afterthought, and loses hours in the basement, adjusting concentrations and taking care of what look to be some of the last of the year's fresh ingredients.

In this house all sounds grow. His footsteps on the elderly wooden staircase creak their way through every room, the clink of glass could wake ghosts. And it is only wizards who become ghosts, of course, but Tobias Snape sleeps uneasily in the walls all the same, haunts every space left too long unused. Eileen couldn't wait to leave.

Silence also grows, becomes dense and textured, especially as autumn deepens and shifts and begins to consider the sharp smell of frost; on occasion he has done everything he can to break it, slammed doors and played music he doesn't care for and let the radio chatter. But by now it has become comfortable, wrapped around him like a winter duvet. He breathes carefully, moves softly, steadies doors with his hand as he closes them and handles ingredients with quiet reverence. Parsley, improbably enough, which can with a little encouragement give alcohol fortifying properties: give it to a person in secret and they will discover secrets. Perhaps. There is mugwort against poison, a little bottle filled with extract created four months past, waiting to be mixed with unflavoured spirits. Tomorrow he must collect juniper berries, he realises, before the birds have made off with everything worth having. And perhaps sloes – tonight may be cold enough to freeze, which is at least good for something.

Despite the tiredness of the day he goes to bed late, having hardly considered Potter at all.


	2. Chapter 2

Sunday, lunchtime, and his breath clouds in front of him even as he boils water for tea over the gas stove, dressing-gown pulled tight around him on top of his clothes. The house has electricity but it has never agreed with him. It knows him for what he is, he thinks, even with his wand in a locked box in the bedroom. It never agreed with his mother, either. She thought at one time that it would try to kill her the moment she gave it a chance; imagined it as some malevolent creature living in the cables, waiting. A kind of incorporeal Slytherin monster to punish her as a blood traitor. She was terrified of touching light switches, could plug in the vacuum cleaner cord on a good day but made Severus turn the socket on.

It is in the middle of these thoughts that Potter takes him by surprise for a second time, entirely unfairly. Potter ought to Apparate sloppily, with the bang of a car exhaust; Severus ought to hear him all the way from the canal, and be on his guard. He does not, is not. There is only a knock on the door and Severus, long since abandoned by reporters and homicidal individuals of all possible loyalties, finally used to being left alone by anyone not on reasonable business, answers—dressing gown and all.

* * *

"Hello," Potter says. "I thought you might be living here." He looks more or less the same as he did on Tuesday, not a piece of clothing on him that isn't worn and scruffy, but he seems damnably comfortable with the whole thing, with himself.

It is not as though Severus doesn't have options. He could slam the door shut again without a word. Snarl: you thought? A first. Never attempt it again. Say the same words but with humour and accept the next time Potter asks him if he wants a drink. Channel Lucius Malfoy, always good for annoying people: to what do I owe the displeasure?

But the words that he says, instinctive and sharp, are: "Who died?"

"What?" Potter says. "No-one died. Should someone have died?" And then, "Can I come in?" He sounds as though he'd like to laugh again.

"I am struggling," Severus hisses, "to imagine what on earth it is that you want with me, if you aren't here to tell me that Draco Malfoy has suffered a freak accident or to share Minerva McGonagall's dying wishes with me."

Inside, the kettle is screaming on the stovetop.

"Sometimes," Potter says, "I really do think you have a sense of humour. Are you going to get that?"

It is too much. "Potter," Severus says. "Stop talking past me and tell me what you want."

"Just to talk, actually. You surprised me the other day, and I probably surprised you too." He shrugs, an easy lift of one shoulder, no evidence of nerves—or, for that matter, of shame. "I had some business in the area this week, so I thought while I was here—"

"We could reminisce about old times and how perfectly we used to loathe each other?" Severus' mouth curls in distaste. "Are you out of your mind? If I had the slightest interest you would find me at the bloody annual reunion."

"No!" Potter says. "Look, can I come in?"

_Over my dead body_, Severus thinks, knee-jerk. But if they are to have the inevitable nostalgic screaming match about who hates who more there is something to be said for doing it in the comfort of his own kitchen, which may not be any warmer than the doorstep but does have the advantage of containing tea and being out of earshot of his few neighbours. He turns and stalks away to lift the kettle from the stove, and trusts that Potter will understand that this is, in terms of invitations, as good as he can ever expect it to get.

He hears Potter close the door behind him, and refuses to consider himself cornered.

This, he thinks, is when the questions begin. He is not sure what questions, exactly; will Potter go for a second attempt at all the answers he never got in the war, or is it more interesting to try and dissect exactly what kind of pervert Severus Snape has turned out to be? But Potter doesn't say anything. Severus focuses on tea, spoons loose leaves straight into the strainer and balances it on the single cup—making a pot would give too much of an impression of welcome. Turns, finally, cup in hand, to find Potter still in the kitchen doorway, leaning against the frame and watching him with some kind of contemplative expression.

"Stop analysing me in my own kitchen," he says. "Tell me what you really want and then get out. I'm not here for your entertainment."

Potter actually hesitates. His eyes dart around the kitchen, and Severus finds himself acutely aware of the peeling paint, the missing tiles over the sink, the cupboard door that he just can't get to close right no matter how much he pokes at the hinges. The awareness morphs into suspicion. Analysing is the key word. The man might in fact be that presumptuous. Severus stiffens.

"I swear, Potter, if you think you're here to be some sort of social worker—"

Potter blinks. "Social—oh, right. Muggles."

Muggle yourself, Severus thinks sourly. If the magical world is to start intruding on his life again he may have to take his wand out of retirement, just for the pleasure of hexing everyone for their pains. The thought threatens to turn his stomach.

"No, look," Potter says. "I just thought—we might have some things in common." Even he seems to know how weak it sounds. "I'm messing this up, aren't I?"

"Yes," Severus says, savagely amused.

But that just makes Potter laugh. "I'll be in town again on Wednesday. If I go away and let you get on with your weekend, will you let me buy you a drink and try again then? Same place?"

Severus tries to weigh his options. But he is very tired and the idea of arguing with Potter is suddenly unbearably draining. Wednesday is far enough away to give him time to adjust to the idea, to accept or reject it—easier to deal with than the reality of Harry Potter in his kitchen right now, examining the fixtures and fittings. And in public there are topics that can't be touched, not directly, which is a definite advantage. "No war stories," he says finally. "No Ministry gossip. And no amateur psychoanalysis."

"Fine," Potter says, and, "thank you." He straightens up. "I liked that dress from last week, by the way. It suited you."

The awful thing is that he manages to sound sincere, which he cannot possibly be.

"Get out," Severus says, although with less feeling than he intends, the words flat and heavy.

"Already gone," Potter calls from the doorstep, and closes the door behind him, though Severus has to go and force the reluctant latch into place.

* * *

These are new mysteries to occupy him, to be prodded like a sore tooth: Harry Potter says that he looks good in a faded and out-of-date red dress found in a case of clothes inherited from Aunt Teresa and painstakingly adjusted on his father's old sewing machine; Harry Potter insists on buying him a drink; Harry Potter claims that they have things in common, for fuck's sake. Should Severus reimagine this scenario with new players, some pair of people who have no particular history, who are neither of them notably hideous or socially incompetent, he would find one conclusion overwhelmingly likely. Here it is impossible. It may be an elaborate practical joke or Potter may be playing the long game in his search for whatever answers he supposes Severus to have, in which case Severus very much looks forward to eviscerating him for it.

* * *

It becomes a cold week; freezing, for the beginning of November. He wears fingerless gloves indoors and smokes too much, though never in the basement—he may have cheated a little with the ventilation in there, in those years when it was a makeshift potions laboratory, but there's no need to push one's luck. He finds himself back at the pub on Monday and sits there until closing time just for the warmth, wonders idly how cold the winter will have to get before he reaches some true crisis point. There is a fireplace in his living room, but the house is badly built and the chimney breast doesn't hold as much heat as it should; nights are hopeless, call for three pairs of socks and a pile of blankets. The latest series of mild winters has spoilt him, that's all there is to it.

On Tuesday he fights with an electric heater with limited success, sells a satisfactory quantity of alcohol to an assortment of regular customers, and wonders what Potter's business in town actually is. He doesn't really remember what Potter is meant to do with his time—hasn't read the Prophet since he moved back to Spinner's End for good and doesn't talk to people if he can avoid it. There was some sort of ludicrous drama with the Auror corps, he thinks, but as for what it was… and that would have been ten years ago now, anyway.

He reads to distract himself, pulling a book from the unstable reading mountain at random: quite a new one of Tove Jansson's, as it turns out, picked speculatively and still unread. A woman called Katri Kling smoking aggressively behind wild black hair in the Baltic winter. _I wasn't objective. Things get out of hand every time I lose my objectivity._ — A good book, quite possibly, but not a good distraction, under the circumstances. Baldwin instead, then—by now a thoroughly explored story where he knows every possible pitfall intimately. It shouldn't be terribly comforting, but there is safety in the well-known. His copy is dog-eared and still bears the stamp of the Cokeworth District Library, although as Severus has had it in his possession since 1975 the point is fairly well moot by now.

* * *

Severus was wrong; there are no definite conclusions to be reached about Potter. By Wednesday afternoon he still has no idea what he's doing; three days have not helped. Thirty probably wouldn't help. He ought to move. Perhaps to an island. But Potter would only take it as a challenge.

He stops thinking about it and goes out before he can change his mind, before Potter can come and hammer on the door and demand to know what he's playing at. He would. He is exactly that oblivious, exactly that capable of smashing people's worlds apart without even noticing.


	3. Chapter 3

"I wondered if you'd really come," Potter says, slides into a chair across the table from Severus, grinning over at him and shrugging off his jacket. His cheeks are pink from the cold, despite the monstrous knitted scarf he's unwinding from around his neck.

"And risk finding you in my kitchen again?"

Potter laughs. "Would that be so terrible?"

Severus feels a sceptical look more than covers his feelings on that point, and Potter seems to agree.

"Well, I'll get you that drink, then," he says quickly.

"Any kind of bitter," Severus tells him.

"Obviously," Potter says, with rather too much evidence of enjoyment at Severus' pronouncement. "OK. Back in a minute." Severus wonders how many times he's going to find himself propositioned on his way to and from the bar, and whether being in Severus' company will be seen as a deterrent or a reason to try for a rescue. Severus never has company here. He does not sit with people, talks briefly with someone at the bar on occasion. It is only ever about sex or business. How else could he do this? To let emotions become involved—

"Broadside," Potter tells him as he puts down the pint glass, and for a surreal second Severus wonders if this is some sort of oblique way of announcing an opening of hostilities. He reorientates himself. The beer.

"Hm," he says. He is not entirely convinced that the Gravedigger's has actually heard of Adnams, but there it is in a matching glass.

This is where it would be correct to say: thank you, Potter. How have you been? Perhaps: What is it you do these days? It is, in fact, the moment for displaying some social skills, which is bound to prove awkward, all things considered.

Potter spares him. "You're welcome." That easy grin again that is obviously intended to take the sting from the words. It is infuriating. "It's good of you to humour me, you know. I had a really long day and I spent half of it wondering if you were going to stand me up instead of paying attention to what I was doing. The little shits always know."

Little shits? "I see," Severus says.

"I mean children," Potter says, and looks, for the first time, slightly embarrassed. "Oh, you don't get the paper any more, I suppose?"

"Mercifully, no."

"Probably for the best, actually," Potter mutters, whatever that's meant to mean. "Well, I work at a primary school. For gifted children."

"Good lord, Potter," Severus says, startled into a bark of humourless laughter that turns several heads in the half-empty room. Gifted indeed. "_You_? And children? I hope they eat you alive. You'd deserve it."

"Don't think they haven't tried," Potter says, running a hand absent-mindedly through his hair. "I can't think of a job that makes better use of special forces training, to be honest."

He is too good at this, doesn't seem to have any sort of thinking pause for wizard-to-Muggle translation. Severus wonders about that. Damned if he's going to ask, though.

"I imagine not," he says. "I feel my life would have been easier if it was mandatory for all teaching staff."

Potter chokes on his drink. "Neville wouldn't have survived school, you git."

"Perhaps not." Severus allows himself a smirk. Potter, wiping his mouth, shakes his head.

"Let's not. Let's just take the whole thing about how you were evil and I was a lazy idiot as read and move on."

"Aren't we grown up," Severus says, not entirely pleasantly, but he doesn't actually disagree. "What _were_ you planning to talk about? I am a recluse with dubious habits, and you are—" the fucking Wizarding world's Jesus "—you. The number of things we could possibly have in common—"

"Well," Harry Potter says, looking pointedly around at the pub, "there's this, for a start. I hardly know anyone like us who's—"

Severus' mouth feels suddenly very dry; he takes a quick swallow of his drink, places the glass down very carefully, exactly; it is horribly difficult to not slop beer across the table, slam the glass awkwardly against the wood. Oh, yes, the only two queer wizards in town.

"If you mean to imply—"

Potter gives him an odd look. "What?"

Perhaps he didn't. Severus shakes his head. "Just tell me what ridiculous point you were trying to make."

"I just thought—we might understand each other. It's kind of like this for me too, you know. I have a little flat in," a very small but somewhat euphemistic hesitation, "South London—it was getting too much, the press, you know—and—well—apart from work, I really only—" He trails off with a lopsided little smile. "There's more, but you said no war stories."

"You, Potter, don't have the first clue what it's like to be me," Severus snaps. "Pray you never learn."

And Potter—fails to recoil, again. "I really don't," he admits. "Not like that. But I'd like to know you better. It doesn't matter if we never talk about all that stuff from, well, back then."

"You're perfectly mad," Severus says. "You know damn well—" he stops, thinking of his own rules. War stories. The war is everywhere, it's just below the surface of everything they say.

"I'll drink to that," Potter says, as though he hadn't noticed those last words, the moment of hesitation. "More of the same?"

Say no; say you only agreed to one drink. He does not want Potter's awkward attempts at friendship; this, exactly this, is what he left the Wizarding world for. To save the Wizarding world the embarrassment of trying to decide if they consider him a hero or a villain; to save himself from having to watch their attempts. To save himself from this sort of idiotic, misguided crusade. Oh, there are bigger things hiding in the depths, but this is the one that was at the front of his mind at the moment of his departure.

But there is a treacherous part of him that pulls towards Potter, pathetically eager for—what? For someone to see him for an instant and then, understanding, leave him alone.

Potter has stood up and moved off to the bar without waiting for an answer. Severus sits where he was left, taut with tension, and remembers that there was a time in his life when he believed he knew his own mind.

* * *

Conversation comes in awkward stops and starts. They have always been at each other's throats, screaming matches and furious silences and even what respect they found at the end came hard, weighed down with resentment. How dare you be good enough. How dare you be sorry. And now they are to make nice; sit and talk about their jobs and step lightly for fear of unexploded bombs. Potter has decreed it.

Severus really wants to smoke. He doesn't want to scream at Potter, he doesn't want to throw bottles at his head or throw a punch at his nose or throw James Potter's personal failings in his face; he was so unspeakably tired of being that person by the end, even though he meant it all, every fucking spiteful word of it. _Things get out of hand every time I lose my objectivity_. Oh, yes. But he still wants—reaction. This blandness is impossible. He wants—

"I'm going to smoke," he says abruptly. Potter nods, watches him as he gets up. "Follow or don't," he adds. "I don't give a damn."

* * *

"Somehow I never imagined you smoking," Potter says, leaning against the wall as Severus shakes his match to extinguish it.

Severus' lip curls. "You never imagined me being human at all if you could help it, Potter. You try growing up in this shit-hole and not smoking." Never mind that he didn't, not then, growing up. No cigarettes, no pills or powders or even potions. Magic can be an addiction in and of itself. Smoking was for the eighties, something to steady shaking hands at four in the morning, so surrounded by the vast, oppressively protective magic of Hogwarts that the thought of one more charm was enough to make him want to puke.

"Fair enough." There's that hand in Potter's hair again. He probably doesn't even know he's doing it. A pause. "Why did you come back here?"

"Because of the beautiful scenery and the charming climate. Next stupid question."

Potter snorts. "If you don't want to answer you can just say so."

"I just did."

"Impossible bastard," Potter says, amiably. He's shrugged his jacket on but it's open, and his scarf is just draped around his neck, ends hanging loose. He shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans, breathes condensation into the night air. "You don't have to tell me, but it's not a filler question or anything."

You've never played the bad cop in your life, have you, you little shit, Severus thinks. "If you used your brain for thirty seconds you could work it out," he says. "But of course you're lazy."

If he can't work it out he really doesn't have a brain, considering how many of Severus' memories he's rifled through in his time. How many of them turned around this place.

Several minutes of silence are won in this way, and Severus smokes in peace, watches Potter from the corner of his eye. Potter is staring up at the sky, at invisible stars or god knows what.

At length, he says, slowly, "Anchorage."

Severus laughs, a little huff of surprised amusement, more or less against his will. "Acceptable. I suppose."

It's actually quite close. Not precisely family, not really nostalgia, not lack of options or lack of imagination or some kind of outburst of self-flagellation, although, certainly, the last may have its appeal. It is simply—ties. He is tied to this place as to no other, not even Hogwarts. He had thought that he might for once in his life try it—allowing himself to settle in the most natural place rather than pulling against it. It brings to mind the inevitable image of mooring posts, straight from the book now lying on his bedside table. Certainly Baldwin meant it to refer to people, but places work by surprisingly similar logic. No, he didn't fully appreciate _Giovanni's Room_ at the age of fifteen, read furtive snatches of it and found it unsatisfying. It lay hidden under his bed for years. But its time came.

It's only when Potter has begged off on grounds of having regular working hours and taken himself home that Severus, sitting finally and mercifully alone at a corner table, realises: Potter never asked about the magic. Not even having seen him standing in his kitchen boiling water like a Muggle.

* * *

There is post for him the next day. Muggle post, which is suspicious—he knows exactly how inefficient the Muggle postal service is, and there is no damn way a letter could have made it from London to Cokeworth in a morning. _Let's do this again_, and Potter's handwriting hasn't precisely improved—more elaborate but not more legible.

The letter stays on his desk with all the rest of the debris, unanswered while Severus attends to his daily life. The page is still crisp, only a few lines of scrawled writing in the middle of a sea of white, edges sharp against smudged grey newsprint and crumpled notepaper, instantly visible every time he passes through the living room. He goes so far as to scrub the bathroom to avoid it, and does rather more washing than he'd planned.

The fact of the matter is that his theoretical objection to Potter's existence is greater than his actual objection to spending time with the man, and he isn't entirely sure what to do with that. Yes, certainly, withdraw into the basement and refuse to answer the door ever again in protest against his own stupidity. And that will definitely solve everything. Damn it.

The idea of drinking alone in his bedroom and ignoring the entire issue has a certain appeal, but he isn't a teenager and he isn't his father and on the whole he's extremely happy about both those facts. Besides: he is overreacting. It is a letter; it is a modest social life on offer, if he wants it. That's all. Harry Potter is only a man; there is still no great plot.

_If you will torture yourself then I won't take responsibility for stopping you_, he scribbles on the back of Potter's letter, and throws it in the postbox at the end of the road, addressed to _Mr H. Potter, who may as well stop pretending he's using the postal system as nature intended_. He does not trouble with a stamp.


	4. Chapter 4

Potter stops by on his way home from his mysterious business again at the weekend. "Oh good, you're home," he says, and then, "Thanks for your note."

"You are thanking me," Severus says, "for a one sentence long message in which I invited you to continue torturing yourself and passed comment on your unsubtle attempts at appearing to use Muggle communication channels. See a mediwizard. Or a doctor, or whatever it is you do."

"Actually, I was thanking you for the note where you agreed to spend more time with me," Potter says. "But when you put it like that…"

Severus snorts. He has been very tired for a very long time now, and that must be why it feels oddly as though he is drifting, as though this is a dream. It could not possibly seem natural, otherwise, to look Potter over irritably and say, "I assume you're going to want tea."

Potter smiles, wide and genuine. "If you're offering."

* * *

A guest at his rickety kitchen table, elbows resting on the scraped wood, hands curled around a cup. The steam from the tea mists Potter's glasses. Ridiculous.

Severus across from him, shoulders stiff.

"I don't mean to be a dick," Potter says. "If you're not comfortable—"

"The last person who sat here and drank tea with me," Severus says, "was Peter Pettigrew. I'm sure even your limited imagination—"

Potter's mouth tightens. "Oh."

It all leads back to war stories. "I'm somewhat less inclined to slip rat poison into your tea, at any rate," he offers.

"Hmm," Potter says. "Promising start." One day he will develop exactly the same kind of twinkle in his eye that Dumbledore used to have.

Don't think about it.

He stares into his tea to avoid Potter's gaze. "I imagine you're less likely to gnaw on the furniture, too."

The existence of Potter's laughter is as surprising as ever.

And here it is, the temptation: to let this farce continue, to let Potter cover one or two old associations with new ones, move through his home and his life and carefully hide away the evidence without knowing that's what it is he's doing. Certainly very few people could be as bad as little Peter, sneaking and crawling and doing it all so badly that Severus could never understand the point of the man. But then, he had his one grand success—

Don't, don't, don't think about it.

"There's a family a few streets over," Potter says, into Severus' silence. "Mill Road. Non-magical to the seventh generation and all of that, except their daughter. I'm trying to get them to understand that it would be good for her… at least part time…" He shrugs. "They're good people, I think, but you know how it is. 'Hi, I'm here from a magical school to tell you that your daughter is very special.' I'd call the police."

You're friends with Granger, Severus thinks. There's no way you've been working on that for two weeks. But a change of topic is not unwelcome.

"That's your new mission, then?" he says. "Save all the Muggle-born from culture shock? How horribly—"

"Gryffindor?"

"Horribly _you_," Severus corrects, manages a modest sneer.

Potter grins. "And save all the pure-blood kids from vanishing up their own backsides while I'm at it. Something like that." He studies Severus, and Severus fights against the need to creep into himself, flinch away from inspection. He knows what he is. How he looks. "If you'd rather talk about something Muggle I can do that. Football scores. Council tax. Batman."

"Batman. Really."

Potter shrugs. "Actually, I like X-Men better, but you know."

"Not," Severus dredges through childhood memories, books passed around a classroom on one of those days when his father remembered about school, sitting in a corner and trying to get a good look at the cover without actually admitting interest. Looking through Lily Evans' collection of mags to kill time during those long summer holidays away from Hogwarts. Those Muggle comics Perry used to hide better than his porn, for all the good it did him in a dormitory full of teenage boys, "Spider-Man?"—Which he thinks was a title, and he must be right, because Potter makes a choking noise and mutters something that sounds like_ too surreal_ into his hand.

"You started it, Potter," Severus says mercilessly.

"And I take full responsibility," Potter says, straightening up a little in his chair, lifting his cup to his lips and sipping at his tea. "That's another thing on the list of stuff I never would've imagined you doing though. Reading comics, I mean."

"I was fairly enthusiastic," Severus says, not as irritated as he feels he ought to be, "for a short period around 1968."

* * *

Potter finds spaces in Severus' life and fits into them. Severus still moves through the same streets; is at home, at the pub, smokes and works and hurries irritably through grocery shopping at Morrisons and imagines running people over with a trolley as a substitute for really doing it, makes aggressive notes in the margins of all his books, finds ways to cohabit comfortably with his own memories. Fucks. But sometimes Potter sits at his kitchen table, or joins him with or without warning in a corner at the Gravedigger's. His old excuse must be long since expired, but he hasn't offered a new one.

It is—not uncomfortable, on balance, although it should be. It is—he does not know what it is, can only define it in negative terms. Not intolerable. Not entirely unwelcome.

It should be horrifying.

* * *

Severus tries to stare steadily at the page in front of him—tries to ignore the fact that Potter is going through his bookshelves. It isn't easy; he can see Potter from the corner of his eye for all his efforts, peering at titles and running his fingers up and down spines, pulling books out to flick through them.

"Checking for pictures?" Severus asks, aware that he is fast losing all plausible deniability on the topic of not paying attention to his visitor. He hardly even remembers what it was he was trying to read, blinks irritably at the page where Holmes is giving an uncommonly impassioned speech on the topic of blackmail and takes the story from the beginning again.

"I can read, thanks," Potter says. "Even big words. Even written in awful tiny handwriting by irritable gits, if you remember."

"I will never be able to forget, thank you."

"You really do make notes in everything, don't you," Potter says, after perhaps thirty seconds of companionable silence.

"Books are functional," Severus says, "and if you want to treat them as sacred fetish objects I suggest you go elsewhere."

"I didn't say I minded." Potter, a volume of the collected works of Asimov in hand, looks over at him with a smile. "They're interesting notes."

The sun has a little warmth left today and floods the room with orange-yellow light. Framed by the bookshelves, untidy and happy, Potter is—not unattractive.

Severus, suddenly uneasy, gives a noncommittal nod. Looks away.

* * *

Monday evening, and the candles on the kitchen worksurface are lit, casting wavering shadows. "Actually," Potter says, "I think you're the only person who didn't tell me this'd be a waste of my Auror training. But when I say explosive sneezing, I mean, it's not exactly a figure of speech. Eight feet in the air at least, and he almost landed on Sara Parkinson."

It has apparently been a long day in the land of other people's regrettably snotty children. "I would have more sympathy if you didn't do this to yourself," Severus points out, but he catches Potter smiling when he hands over the tea—the sod has noticed that he got the best cup.

"You wouldn't," Potter says.

"No," Severus says. "I admit it. I was less than truthful. I have never in my life felt sympathy for anyone. Drink your tea."

He still doesn't know what Potter wants. What price will be demanded of him for accepting—whatever this is. There will, of course, be a price.

* * *

Late November heading for December and the cold begins to let up a little, although it remains bitter inside the house. Severus has very little to do; he has collected and prepared and bottled and has as much alcohol ready as he could feasibly sell this side of New Year. It is tempting to go into a sort of hibernation, retreat under his blankets, read and sleep and sleep some more. Spend the winter safe in there, protected from Potter, from himself.

But he is restless, too, paces around the house and has a hard time sleeping despite winter tiredness. He's never sure when Potter will turn up, and begins to find it irritating, although he was the one who disliked the idea of constantly checking calendars, of letters and arrangements and being constantly required to give consent, to be an active participant in this erosion of his understanding of himself. He finds odd jobs to do, cleans everything, and when Potter turns up with a bag of shopping in one hand the last Sunday of the month he finds Severus covered in dust from the basement, in no mood to stop.

"You can help," Severus says, and only realises half way down the steps that this is a new level of trust. Potter has never been down here; they have not, in actual point of fact, discussed the details of what it is Severus does, although it's quite possible Potter knows anyway. Goodness knows half of Wizarding Britain seems to, in some strictly unofficial and entirely inexplicable way.

"I'm so fucking glad I'm not an Auror anymore," Potter mutters, staring around at the temporarily chaotic mess of bottles, leaning over to inspect labels; he has felt it, then, the background hum of magic in the room that Severus has never been able to do a damn thing about. "Dragon's blood? Really?"

A rare purchased ingredient, that one. He prefers to collect everything himself, from hedgerows and wastelands and people's neglected gardens; it is remarkable what can be found within walking distance. But there is a certain temptation on occasion to experiment. "Tree sap, Potter," Severus says, exasperated. "Dracaena cinnabari."

"The international statute of secrecy is relieved to hear it I'm sure," Potter says, shaking his head. "OK, what are we doing?"

They spend hours cleaning bottles and shelves. Severus re-writes labels, and labels the shelves, too, so that even Potter can manage to put things back in the right place. The space is in reality a little too small for two to move through, and they come up against each other constantly, take awkward steps back and try to ignore the embarrassment of close proximity with a person one is not, after all, intimate with.

"Where did you learn all this?" Potter asks, peering at his handiwork. "I mean, we never used stuff like—um—bird-cherry at Hogwarts."

"We didn't boil our own water for tea either," Severus points out irritably. "The bloody point of living like a Muggle is—"

He snaps his mouth shut. No, no, they're not talking about this. He's not talking to Potter about his life choices or, for that matter, his bloody father. That's the limit, exactly there.

They stare each other down. Potter blinks first. Shrugs, and goes back to filling the shelves in front of him. "Point," he says, as though there hadn't been a moment there at all. "Hey, can I shift the shelf labels along a bit? The elderflower's never going to fit in this space."

* * *

Finally tidying away the last of the day's debris, Severus finds himself wondering if his mother thought it would work to marry a Muggle just because he knew about herbs, believed in old cures—if it would be almost like talking to a wizard who loved potions or herbology. He wonders if she thought it would help that he was baffled by British Muggle society, too. They never talked about anything like this; his parents' marriage is a mystery to him. He has only fragments: Tobias Snape carrying him along a green lane at the edge of town, Severus perched on his shoulders, picking rose-hips and haws from the high tangled hedges, naming all the things that could be used against aches and pains and colds and scrapes, all the things that shouldn't be touched, naming them by names that Severus did not know were strange until much later. Eileen, showing him things Tobias could never see, redcaps lurking around the edge of a car park that must have been built on some old battle site, the faint shift in shade of dandelion leaves when the roots are at their best for potions, the twisting tendrils of devil's snare in the dark. A sort of competition, he supposes; a covert fight for his understanding, before open warfare took over entirely.


	5. Chapter 5

Potter is already at the pub when he arrives, sitting on a bench against the wall, fiddling with something in his hand that it takes Severus a moment to realise is some sort of mobile telephone. This is one of those Muggle things that will never really make sense to him, but then again, there are plenty of entirely Muggle men only a little older than him who don't really seem to understand the intricacies of the whole business either, so he is not, at least, alone. Potter puts the thing away when he catches sight of Severus, anyway.

There are dark circles under Potter's eyes, and he seems a little unfocused, overtired. "Good evening to you too," he says, looks Severus over, a quick glance up and down his body, undisguised. Severus is wearing the dress from that first time, he realises, the one that Potter told him suited him. Potter's lips part slightly, like he's thinking of saying something about it. But he just gives Severus an attempt at a smile and picks up his drink.

Severus, who actually came here tonight with the express purpose of getting off and had every intention of saying so should he run into Potter, sits down. "Drink and go home, Potter," he says. "Or are you _trying_ to kill yourself with exhaustion?"

"I'm fine," Potter says, stubborn. "You know exactly how exhausting children can be."

"I know that I didn't travel half way across the country three times a week when I was teaching," Severus snaps, although the truth of this is questionable—but he certainly never went to a secret Death Eater murder party for the good of his health. "Go home. Exactly nothing is going to happen tonight except my pathetic attempts at having a sex life, which I promise you is a spectacle better missed."

Does something in Potter's expression tighten then? Perhaps Severus only wants to think so. Wants there to be tension, wants Potter to be uncomfortable.

"Why do you do that?" Potter says. "Act like you're something to be laughed at. Like wanting to fuck someone is—a joke."

Severus pales. Of course Potter had to. "In case you hadn't noticed," he snarls, "I'm an ugly old man in a dress. If I don't point it out I can promise you someone else will."

Potter's fingers clench and uncurl again against the table; he starts to reach out, seems to catch Severus' expression and falters.

"Go away," Severus says tightly. "Get out."

"Come home with me," Potter blurts out, and colours.

Something wrenches horribly inside Severus. "You presume—"

Potter is looking at him with an expression that is too warm. "I like you," he says. As though it were something simple. As though it were not the most ridiculous, impossible thing anyone has ever told him—and there is no shortage of competition for that title.

And there it is, the rage that has been missing, spiralling through him and tearing at the last of his capacity for calm.

"You dare—get _out_, Potter, you insolent bastard. I don't fuck people I—I _certainly_ do not go home with people."

* * *

But later, after Potter has fled, he does: follows an acquaintance who lives half a mile away home and has sex in a bed for the first time in five years, lying on his stomach and pressing his face into lumpy pillows as his arse is fingered, underwear pushed down around his thighs and dress pooled around his waist, rocking his hips, rubbing his cock urgently against smooth sheets. Fingers are good, send just the right sparks of half-uncomfortable pleasure through him, but the thought of a cock is suddenly too much, so they suck each other off instead, unhurried, and it's terrifyingly relaxed, not fumbling clawing biting fucking but almost like—something else altogether.

It takes him a long time to come, and when he goes outside to smoke after his hands feel shaky and something awful is threatening to happen in his chest. Potter's horrified expression when he excused himself keeps returning to him. And the words that Severus didn't quite say, but can't unthink. People I like. Severus Snape, you pathetic arsehole.

* * *

Potter stays away. Severus, who told him to go, after all, decides not to miss him. It's all the same to him; he has enjoyed ten years of solitude, most of them without a hint of news about the man, and there is no reason why the silence in the house now should be any different from the silence that he had made peace with a month ago. But that doesn't stop the claustrophobic quality that the house gains from spreading. He feels angry and closed in.

He finds a notebook of Potter's down the side of the sofa, filled from one end with ideas for lessons and from the other with more random notes—the address of a bar in Vauxhall, a little sketched map of Piccadilly Circus covered in incomprehensible arrows, long series of numbers. A name,Max, and some sort of string of letters and symbols underneath—_email me!_—a little cartoon heart. There's a pair of gloves knitted in lime green and purple stripes under one of Severus' own books, which has mysteriously been left on a windowsill. A rather chewed pen stands in an empty teacup by the sink. Potter can forget anything anywhere.

Potter can forget him, too, Severus supposes, and go back to Vauxhall, to central London, to brighter places filled with younger people. It ought to be easy, despite whatever impulse it was that seized him that last night—perhaps something as simple and common and unfortunate as pity.

Severus has never wanted Potter's damn pity, or anyone else's. He has never wanted Potter to like him. His Muggle friends can keep him.

* * *

A new letter finds him. It's a Sunday in the middle of December, the third of Advent, though Severus lights only his usual candles against the early sunset. Muggle post indeed—but no owls are in evidence, at least. The letter is longer, very badly written. _Apologise—don't know what I was thinking—you could visit anyway—dinner maybe—coffee? That's not a euphemism_. Have you been using a thesaurus, Potter?

He tries the idea of visiting Potter on for size. Taking the train south, through miles and miles of countryside and small towns to and into the great urban sprawl of London, finding his way through unfamiliar streets, standing awkwardly on Potter's doorstep, horribly plain in a socially acceptable shirt and trousers. His skin crawls at the thought.

_No time_, he writes, in full defiance of the facts as known both to himself and to Potter. And, _You may remove your notebook before I throw it away_.

* * *

Potter is there within the hour, shifting nervously on the doorstep.

"I assume," Severus says harshly, "you're going to want tea."

He is not holding his breath.

Potter looks up at him with a cautious, slightly startled smile. It is a shadow of that other one, that other afternoon, but it's there. "If you're offering."

* * *

The tea-cups are empty and Potter hasn't made any move to go—but Severus hasn't made any move to evict him, either, so they're more or less even. They're sitting in the living room, to be close to the fire; Potter has a blanket around his shoulders, his legs tucked up under him on the sofa.

"You should get electric heating," Potter says.

Severus gives him a withering look. "Oh, yes, I'd never thought of that before."

Potter laughs. "There's electricity, though, isn't there?"

"Nominally," Severus mutters. "It seems to—disagree with me."

"The wiring's probably really old," Potter says, eyes going to the bakelite light-switch by the door. "I'm amazed nothing's burnt down yet."

"I'm sure you're an expert," Severus says, acid, because this honestly hadn't occurred to him, which makes him a damn poor excuse for a sort-of not-really Muggle.

"I know a bit," Potter says. "Ron's the real expert, though. He and Hermione have this project trying to get computers to work in Diagon Alley."

God help us all, Severus thinks. Knowing Granger, they'll probably succeed. And it's probably only one of five hundred projects the woman is keeping running simultaneously. He wonders if the Wizarding world looks even a little like the one he remembers.

"I'm having a party next weekend," Potter says idly, pulling the blanket tighter around himself. "I keep wanting to invite you, but I bet you'd never come."

"No," Severus concedes. "I don't know why you'd ask me."

Laughter. "Because I like you, you idiot—no, don't take it like that. Look," Potter says, turning toward him, his face half-shadowed, "go out on Saturday. I'll come and drink with you. I don't have much time until then. Some of the kids from non-magical families wanted an end of term play. You can't imagine the horror. You've never seen anything like it, I promise you. Scorpius Malfoy is playing a very special snowflake."

* * *

It is a good week for business—Christmas, of course. The Gravedigger's has been festooned in sad pieces of tinsel for weeks already, but the sound system is fortunately not working right and Severus is therefore spared Frosty the Snowman—a prospect which would have been enough to keep him shut up in his home until January. Buying food is a severe trial. Although he has little specific attachment to Christmas in any direction he can't help but feel that winter music should be something other than relentlessly upbeat, more blood and snow and as thin a veneer of modernity as possible. These festivals are not, in his view, a party. They are a fortress against the dark. And the dark is real enough—he does not want to remember the ways he has spent certain winter solstices. (Dark magic is the only kind he has ever had true flair for. Everything else has been competence.)

He puts up no tinsel, but hangs holly and ivy on the door, twined together. It is a modest enough declaration of hope that spring may also come next year.

* * *

Saturday evening and it's crowded. Severus doesn't find Potter, and hovers near the door, unable to settle. He wonders if he ought to have gone to Potter's damn party after all, but the thought of it is horrifying—Granger and Weasley and whatever Muggle friends it is Potter has, and Severus Snape in the corner like a curiosity, incorrect in every possible way. A conversation piece.

And here is Potter, rushing in in a swirl of cold air from the street; he makes straight for Severus, and before Severus has registered what's happening there's a hand squeezing his arm and Potter's breath is warm against his ear, "Happy Christmas, you bastard."

They don't sit across from each other but side to side with their backs to the wall, Potter's leg pressed against his. Potter in his jeans and sweater is an odd match for Severus, who wears a knee-length black dress, long-armed and high-necked, quite severe even before it fell victim to his bony form. Their arms brush as they move, reach for drinks or settle themselves more comfortably. Their hands meet and part too quickly, too conscious of things he would rather have remained unaware of, possibilities.

There is, strictly speaking, no need to sit this close together. A crowded night here still leaves room to breathe.

Severus does not feel—does not want—wants—and, wanting, knows that Potter has already cracked something inside him that he has no idea how to repair.

"How do you feel about casual sex?" Potter says, looking anywhere but at him. His hand is on his own knee, but his fingers are lying against the edge of Severus' dress, just barely brushing his skin. "Because I really need to get laid, to be honest."

It will only become tangled. There is a reason he isn't really friends with people here. He and Potter have the worst sort of history, they have all the weapons to destroy each other, they've even tried to use them before—this weird truce can't possibly last, it would be unspeakably stupid.

He is too tired. He can smell Potter, like warmth, like—

"Don't be idiotic," he says. "I can hardly think of a worse thing to do."

Potter takes an unsteady breath. "What if we pretended that none of that was—what if we ignored all that stuff. History." He glances up at Severus and away again, eyes half obscure behind his glasses. "It's only sex, after all."

* * *

They fuck in a toilet cubicle, Potter's jeans open to let Severus swipe his thumb over the head of Potter's cock, drag rough fingers up the length of it inside Potter's boxer shorts, Potter's hands sliding up the outside of Severus' thighs and lifting the heavy black fabric of his dress with them, tracing the lines of his hip-bones, fingers clenching as Severus finds a sensitive point. Potter's head is rolled back against the plywood wall of the cubicle, he is all but panting as Severus strokes him, making desperate little noises that he's trying to hold back. Outside people are moving around, footsteps in the corridor, the door swinging open and closed, voices, and it shouldn't be any more obscene than any other night, no-one here knows who they are, but it is, it is, Severus Snape giving Harry Potter a handjob in a public place, it cannot be real.

"So much—easier with silencing charms," Potter gasps, bites his lip as Severus smirks and pushes Potter's boxers out of the way, moans as Severus shoves a knee between his legs, takes hold of his cock again, tugs.

Severus bends his mouth to Potter's neck to lick and nip his way from clavicle to jaw, breathing in the smell of him. It's dizzying, half-familiar, makes him achingly hard, desire that threatens to spill over into horror, but then Potter's hands find his cock and all thought spins momentarily away, leaves him thrusting into Potter's curled fingers, half-collapsed against him, and it is only sex, only sex, he has sex all the time, but oh, it's good.

* * *

In the aftermath he is shaken and unsteady, Potter's hands moving uncertainly on his back. This is where Severus would usually just walk away, go home or go outside to smoke and consider whether he might enjoy something more from someone else in an hour or so. What is he meant to do now?

"Maybe," Potter says, still slightly breathless, "another drink."

He remembers with an effort how it is that he pulls himself together, straightening his back, closing down his thoughts. "I've had enough," he says.


	6. Chapter 6

It is the twenty-seventh before he sees Potter again, and by then he has broken his own rules again—spent Christmas day in a haze of alcohol alone on his sofa, reading Faulks. He is in the mood to be irritated about stories about war, and making snide remarks about the sex scenes in the margins is an extra pleasure. On Boxing Day, sober and hungover from Faulks as much as from the alcohol, he moves on to Delany. Delany is vastly preferable—certainly has something to say, as far beyond Severus' theoretical grasp of the world as he can on occasion be—prompts curious rather than spiteful notes. Finally desperation and boredom drive him back to the Jansson book he abandoned in November, although its tangle of truth and deception is uncomfortable. But productivity is entirely out of the question.

If Severus spends unusually large amounts of time in other people's worlds during those in-between days there is at least no-one to comment on it, to try and worm reasons out of him. If he tries to keep his head full of spite or spends time picking at the logic of fictional systems of desire it is his own damn business. It has nothing to do with—anyone. With Potter.

* * *

He does not sleep particularly well, which is not a new problem but isn't any less frustrating for that. Lies on his side in his bed, staring into the darkness of his room, tracing the faint glimmer of light from the city outside that filters around the edge of his curtains, and cannot escape the almost physical uneasiness that spreads through him—tightening his muscles, twisting in his chest, disconnected from any specific thought but a living thing in itself. Curls on the sofa again, reads until the book slips onto the floor and wakes a few hours later with his back protesting against the mistreatment, a stiff shoulder, aching hips and freezing hands. Remembers.

Remembers Rosier and Mulciber and—Lily. Furtive hate-tinged sexual fantasy on the one hand and desparate love on the other, separated as though by a wall. James Potter and Sirius Black. The Dark Lord. Albus. Albus who kissed him on the forehead and said _you know it will be soon_, laid a hand on his hair as though he could absolve all sins, as though he could take away everything that had been and everything that was to come, the Astronomy Tower, Charity Burbage, _Potter_—

Fifteen years is not long enough, thirty years is not long enough. It cannot be taken away.

* * *

He coughs his way through that morning, Thursday; discovers he is nearly out of tea and that there's nothing to eat for breakfast, ignores the whole issue and digs through old notebooks to see if there are any ideas for combinations of herbs he has had and forgotten, determined to make work for himself. Uses yesterday's teacup as an ash-tray, hunched over his desk, scribbling away, tearing out pages and throwing them at the wall.

And then there's Potter, hammering at the door. "Isn't it a bit bloody early," Severus growls, and Potter frowns.

"It's two o'clock."

Of course it is.

He lets Potter in, and Potter, still frowning, catches his hand as he turns away from the door. "Are you alright?"

"Of course I'm not bloody alright," Severus says, but he can't do this, can't talk about it, has even avoided thinking the thought for the last five days. "You try sleeping in this pathetic house." But he's certain there's something in his voice, the words catch, the tone is wrong, and Potter must know it too, must be able to tell.

"Damn it," Potter says, under his breath. "I shouldn't have," he says, and, "I just wanted—I want—"

And it can only be because Severus doesn't want to hear it that he kisses the man, right there against the cracked plaster of the wall in the hallway, hands in Potter's messy hair, tilting his head up, angling Potter's mouth to meet Severus' thin dry lips.

He has gone insane.

He hasn't washed. He isn't dressed. His mouth must taste like ash. But Potter groans against him as though he's desperate, kisses him open-mouthed and hot, hands grasping at him. As though he can't do anything else. As though he really does want Severus.

It could never just be sex.

They should never have started. This is a place he has never been, cannot go. It won't work, it can't work, it was never for him.

But he can't, doesn't want to stop. Not so long as Potter is arching against him like this, already hard under his jeans, making little gasping noises into the kiss when Severus' hands find just the right spot on the back of his neck, when Severus bites at his lip.

"I missed you," Potter says, "at—Christmas," groans as Severus kisses his jaw, finds a sensitive spot just under his ear and kisses there, too. "I love my friends—family—do that again—" Severus obliges. "But I kept thinking about, oh god, about drinking tea with—you—"

"Drinking tea?" Severus manages. His hands are under Potter's shirt, fingers splayed across warm skin, feeling the quick shifts of Potter's stomach muscles as he breathes, sliding up to brush over Potter's nipples. Tea. It is—almost believable. Not Severus himself, not his bony hands and his ugly face and his lank hair and his dresses, but a cup of tea in a kitchen, companionable silence, conversation where harsh words become a private joke—this he can believe in. Can believe Potter wants. At least now and then.

"Tea," Potter says. "And—other things." And, "Oh, god, I want to touch your cock again."

Severus closes his eyes but cannot steady himself. "Do it," he says.

Potter makes a breathless sound that might be laughter. "Come here." Sinks down to the cold floor, pulling Severus with him.

They land in a tangle, Potter slumped back against the wall and Severus kneeling over him, and he's far too old for this to be comfortable, but Potter is fumbling with Severus' long nightshirt, pulling it up, drawing his hands along the backs of Severus' thighs, shockingly warm in the winter air; that must be why he shivers. It cannot be anticipation.

And then Potter is touching him, just right, just rough enough, and Severus gives up on his legs altogether, sinks down onto Potter's lap, grinds his arse against Potter's still-covered cock in time to the movement of Potter's hands on him, and it is Potter who whimpers, whose breath hitches, "I'm going to come all over myself if you don't—oh—"

Severus' own orgasm comes so suddenly that he doesn't feel ready for it, crashes over him and leaves him trembling, again, in Potter's arms.

"OK," Potter says. An uncertain laugh. "OK, that—wasn't what I was expecting when I turned up." Potter's hands smooth their way down over Severus' hips, up over his lower back, making broad circles on his skin.

Severus' knees ache, his legs are covered in gooseflesh. He can feel the beginnings of horrified embarrassment threatening to rise in him like bile. He's just had sex with Harry Potter on the floor in his own hallway, because he didn't want to hear Potter talk about his feelings. Because he didn't want to think about what's been going on in his own head.

Because—damn it, damn it, damn it—because he wanted Potter. Wants him, still, every last annoying interfering incoherent bit of him.

There.

The vulnerability of it is unbearable.

"I'm going to shower," he says, scrambles to his feet, pulling away from Potter. Flees the scene without looking at Potter's face, and locks the bathroom door behind him.

* * *

There's no warm water, of course; Severus usually gets it from the kettle, takes shallow baths or scrubs himself over the sink. But he has to be clean, now, and Potter is presumably still in his hallway, or in his kitchen, or poking around in the living room—could be waiting outside the door. He strips and stands shivering and miserable under icy water. There is a peculiar sense of awareness of just how bloody-minded he's being, how ludicrous, but he doesn't seem able to stop all the same. After fifty-two years more changes are probably a lost cause; he should just be glad he got as far as he did, shouldn't he. He could be Lucius. He could be Peter fucking Pettigrew.

Instead he's Severus Snape, trying to give himself hypothermia rather than talk about things like a well-adjusted adult. Brilliant.

Eventually he has to come out, wrapped in a heavy dressing gown, hunched in on himself. The only way he's getting warm now is by crawling back into bed, but Potter is probably still around here somewhere.

* * *

In the living room, as it turns out, with a small pile of books beside him, sitting in a little huddle on the sofa. He's got one book in his hand, but it isn't open; he's just clutching it absent-mindedly, turning it over. He has, Severus decides, been waiting. The books are only props.

"I'm starting to think," Potter says, "that you're trying to kill yourself without having to actually think about killing yourself." His tone is conversational. His expression does not match it. "When did you last eat, by the way?"

Perfect. A topic he knows how to deal with.

"I hardly think," Severus snarls, "that's any of your goddamn business, Potter."

"Oh," Potter says. "Really. So it's fine if I hang around and drink with you and screw you so long as we all pretend that no-one actually gives a shit, like I don't notice that there's no food in the cupboards or that you're standing there shivering right now because it's so fucking cold in here." No more conversational tone; by now he is shouting. It is—reassuring. "_Fuck_ that."

"Are you my mother?" Severus says, low. That's right; be as spiteful as you can. "Do you think you're going to come and save me from my immoral lifestyle?" I don't want anything from you. I don't need you.

"No," Potter snaps, "I'm not your mother, you stubborn arsehole, and I don't care what she told you was moral or immoral, I don't give a shit! Sleep with who you want, wear what you want, fuck knows I do. But I don't want you to make yourself sick. I don't think I'm being that unreasonable!"

"You're an idiot with a hero complex." Severus is tense with rage, but breathing is still easier. There's a strange flood of relief: it's finally happening, they've done it now. No more waiting. "And don't you _dare_ talk about what my mother might have told me. You have no idea. None!" You can't have any idea about mothers. I got yours killed. I loved her, and I betrayed her, and she died. Go on, _say it_. Tell me how the deaths of everyone you cared about are my fault. He wants it, can almost taste it, Potter's blame. Potter is really angry now, Severus can feel the magic around them, hardly controlled. Potter is practically vibrating with it.

"Maybe I don't," Potter says, "And I don't know what you're thinking. I just know I've started to like you for some fucked up reason and I can't—I don't want to—I can't do this."

The magic spikes, pulls in around Potter and snaps out from his body like a shockwave. Glass will shatter, his books will come down from the shelves—Severus refuses to duck away from it, hopes that it stings, tears, a two-year-old's magical temper tantrum with all the power of their lord and saviour behind it—but there's only an unnervingly loud crack of Disapparition, and Severus is alone in his suddenly warm house.


	7. Chapter 7

He wonders if Potter is planning to come back, if this was meant to be a dramatic exit or a strategic retreat. He wants him back. He wants him back so he can scream at him some more, for presumption, for carelessness, for not blaming him for everything he's meant to be blamed for. For the fact that Severus wants him, likes him.

He was never meant to like Potter. Potter was meant to be his duty and then he was meant to be done. He _was_ done.

Severus paces through the house. He should put clothes on, he should get drunk. He should pick up Potter's damn jacket that he left lying in the hall, should make a cup of tea, should throw himself in the canal—no, not that. Don't think it, don't even think it flippantly. They didn't find Tobias Snape's body for weeks.

* * *

Upstairs in his bedroom he considers clothes. It is at least safer than some other topics, fraught as it may be. Worn shirts and trousers to be invisible in, for workrooms and supermarket aisles and the bookshop. Robes, long unused, each a particular reminder of something better forgotten. Dresses, hung carefully in a row, out of fashion or cheaply made or badly altered, and they're still the ones that call to him, that he wants to run his hands over, pull on—wear what you want, Potter said, and damn him, damn him, Severus doesn't need his permission.

* * *

Potter finds him sitting at his kitchen table in a warm grey dress that he seldom wears, some machine-knitted thing, nothing daring about it except the fact that it is on his body at three on a Thursday afternoon and he hasn't had anything to drink and he isn't looking for sex. And there hasn't been a knock on the door, hasn't been a single sound of Apparition or of footsteps but there Potter is, clutching what must be at least five bags of groceries, mouth set in a determined line.

"I'm going to put this stuff away," he says. "If you want to keep shouting you can do it while I work."

"You heated my house," Severus says.

"Yeah," Potter agrees. "I should've asked, but I didn't really mean to do it. And you would've said no." Things are being lined up on the worksurface now, packets of tea, cartons of milk, brown bread in a paper bag, marmalade, eggs, something in a thin white plastic wrapping that might be ham. When Potter opens the fridge, it looks like it's clean and working. It hasn't worked since the nineties. He just never got around to throwing it away.

"With magic." He can still feel it humming along his nerves, Potter's presence spread through every room, through every part of him. Potter probably doesn't even know how it feels. He might live in a Muggle building but he carries a wand with him, uses magic when he forgets himself, Apparates from London to Cokeworth and back over and over as though it were nothing. Just to drink tea with Severus, who he was always meant to loathe.

"I _am_ kind of sorry about that part," Potter says. "I don't really know what the deal is, but I know you don't want anything more to do with all that." He's stretching to put things in cupboards. Severus can't see his face.

"It's fine," Severus says, rather tiredly.

Potter stops trying to force a fifth tin of tomatoes onto a now over-full shelf, turns around sharply. "It's fine? Really?"

"I said it's fine," Severus repeats.

"Sorry," Potter says. "Just a bit shocked. You are the same person who once threw a jar at my head, right?"

"If you remember that and you still want to have sex with me, then you're sicker than I thought."

Potter just shrugs. "Maybe I am."

"And if you came back here thinking I was going to throw things at your head, then you need to—"

"—see a doctor. Yeah." Potter grins. "I didn't think you would, for what it's worth. You were just kind of worse under pressure back then than you wanted everyone to believe. I'm pretty sure I'm not as scary as Voldemort."

"War stories," Severus says, deeply uncomfortable with being excused.

"Yeah," Potter says. "I'm dropping it. Let's eat something, OK?"

* * *

He leaves Potter clearing away the last of their strange mid-afternoon meal. In the living room, Our Lady of the Flowers is lying on the sofa. Severus picks it up, stares at it—it must have been the book in Potter's hands when they fought earlier. He wonders if Potter opened it, read anything Severus wrote in it, or if he just wanted something in his hands.

While he couldn't say what's in every book he's ever written in, this one stands out regrettably clearly. He is torn between hiding it under the sofa and throwing it in Potter's face. Don't you dare make excuses for me. I know what I am. What I've been.

"I didn't quite mean what I said earlier," Potter says from behind him. Severus turns. Potter is standing in the doorway, hands in his pockets. He's looking straight at Severus now, no avoidance.

"Which particular bit?" Severus asks. "I seem to recall your saying all sorts of things."

"I do kind of care who you sleep with," Potter says. Shrugs. "But it's not exactly a moral thing. It's just that I'd like to keep having sex with you."

"What a deeply romantic proposal."

Potter laughs. "Oh, because romance is exactly what you look for in a person."

"And you'd know, I suppose."

"Well," Potter says, "I have a few theories I'd like to test, anyway."

Severus considers this. He hasn't looked for an intimate relationship with another person in decades, hasn't longed for someone to come along and sweep him away, can't imagine romantic dinner dates or blushing declarations of love. But sex. A few theories. Some more cups of tea. Would it really be so bad?

He is still holding Genet.

"I am not pleasant," he says, feels the solid truth of the words as he speaks them, though they are also wholly inadequate.

"You think I don't know what you're like by now," Potter says with a lopsided smile.

The book between Severus' hands is a celebration of sorts. Genet's, and his own added to it, 1977, 1978. One of the only Muggle books he touched those years. It is entirely vile.

Potter thinks he knows. He really believes it. And Severus could probably let him believe it; who would contradict him now? The list of people who even remember that time has grown incredibly short.

"Here," Severus says, and tosses the book in Potter's direction. Potter's reflexes are still good; he snatches it easily from the air, flips it over to stare at the cover. Opens it, perhaps noting ancient library stamps, the last dates. He never bought his books in those days, and never got them stamped out by librarians either; took furtively, considering Muggle literature in general inherently pornographic, impossible to show another person. In this case, not entirely incorrect. "Homework. Come back when you're done."

* * *

Potter is back before the end of the day, turns up on his doorstep at eleven o'clock, no coat, pacing back and forth. Severus has spent a long tense evening trying to pretend there's absolutely nothing to be tense about and was quite prepared to spend the next day doing exactly the same thing, had suspected that Potter would find he had things to weigh up, that he might in the extreme just fail to come back at all. Although he has been waiting, he doesn't feel prepared.

"This is what it's about, isn't it," Potter says. "This whole thing with magic."

"Not on the street, Potter," Severus says automatically, steps back to let Potter inside.

He doesn't kiss Potter. They don't fuck in the hallway. But there is still the pull of it, the urge to touch, despite everything, all his reasons.

"We're going to talk now," Potter says, "And you're not going to throw me out until we're done."

Severus gives a jerky nod. There is no _you'll want tea, I suppose_, no safe shield. He wanted Potter to really see him, didn't he? Isn't that why he gave him the damn book? Well, here they are. Be careful what you wish for.

"What I don't get," Potter says, "is why you'd think this stuff still defines you, even after everything else."

Severus sneers, he can't help it. "What else did I ever do? Tortured students. Watched people die because saving them would have cost too much. I followed orders. Look where it led."

"We won," Potter says, very carefully.

"Yes, Potter," Severus says. "We won. And in peace-time I am an embarrassment. I suppose I might have made a passable martyr, but living I am inconvenient. You know it."

"So you shut yourself away for everyone's convenience. That's very noble of you." There he is, just for a moment, the Potter that Severus remembers: _no need to call me sir, professor_.

"I suggest you leave sarcasm to people who are better at it," Severus says.

Potter laughs, humourless.

"I shut myself away for my own convenience," Severus says. "Having destroyed more or less everything I ever cared about I rather felt it might be for the best that I not live with people shoving the wreckage in my face."

"Ok, that's probably true," Potter says. "But you're still lying. Want to try again?"

"Not particularly."

He has no idea what his expression may be like right now, but something about it seems to bring Potter up short. "Severus—"

"You already know," Severus says. He can hear himself how harsh he sounds, even though he hardly speaks above a whisper. "Must you make me say it?"

Magic can be an addiction; certain kinds of magic even more so. One can rip away half of oneself and not even realise it for years.

One can write eloquently on the topic of murder on the blank pages at the back of a Muggle book. Construct beautifully elegant spells, each with a more horrific effect than the last, in the margins. One can fantasise about the death of one's father, imagine it as a symbol for freedom.

He had no idea. He didn't understand what any of it meant.

It cannot be taken away.

The coolness of Potter's hand is startling, fingers brushing across the lines of his face, smoothing over cheekbones, the corner of his mouth, the line of his jaw.

"No," Potter says softly. "No, it's OK."

He thought, once, that he would pay all remaining debts with his death, but the world failed to oblige at the appropriate moment. Even that feels like egotism now. He rather felt like dying and created a grand justification for letting it happen, should an opportunity arise.

At the hearing, Potter called him brave, shouted it at everyone, demanded it become true. Potter, who had been through his memories. Who should have known. Must have known.

"It's OK," Potter says again, takes Severus' face loosely between his hands, and Severus shudders, shaken by unnamed emotion, perhaps terror or desire, and aren't the two always so close together with Potter.

"I haven't changed my mind," Potter says. "You can say no," he says. "But you can't—drive me off with books." He looks up at Severus, fingers still moving absently, thumb over cheekbone.

"It's quite late," Severus says. He has not reached out for Potter, cannot find the courage, not quite yet. "You may stay here tonight."

I would make you tea in the morning.

I would let you leave my books in any corner of the house you liked.

It is not exactly romance. Is it? Perhaps it is something smaller, something he can manage. (There is nothing manageable about it.)

"I think that'd be best," Potter agrees. Steps closer, his body warm now against Severus', his hands sliding into Severus' hair, rubbing lightly at his scalp. "I'd like to kiss you."

Severus doesn't mind. Allows himself be drawn down, opens his mouth to Potter's, to warmth and teasing lips and the first dizzy sparks of arousal. Potter's hands are on his neck, his shoulders, they smooth down his back, pull him closer, and he groans at the contact, finally reaches for Potter in return.

* * *

"I want you inside me," Potter says against his mouth, and for a moment Severus hardly understands the words, because Potter kisses him again, tongue sliding over his lips, oh god, "I want you—in my mouth," Potter groans, "I want to suck you until you're shaking and then I want you to pin me face down and—oh—"

Potter is only wearing a t-shirt, loose jeans, boxer shorts; it's easy to slide hands underneath, to stroke at the very base of his spine, one finger just brushing between the cheeks of his arse. Potter's hips surge forward, pressing his cock urgently against Severus' thigh.

"Yeah," Potter says, breathlessly. "Exactly."

"Not here on the floor," Severus says. "I refuse to contemplate—twice in one day—"

But Potter has a hand between Severus' legs, just rubbing at his cock through layers of fabric, not trying to get any of it out of the way, and Severus sounds less resolute than he might have hoped.

"I know this is a wild idea," Potter says, "but have you thought about using the bed?"

* * *

Twined together on Severus' bed it seems most important just to touch, run his hands over every bit of Potter he can reach, and Potter doesn't seem to mind, lets Severus undress him, explore his arms, the dip of his stomach, the line of his spine. He groans and arches when Severus fingers his nipples, so Severus bends his mouth to one, too, swipes his tongue across it, nips carefully, and Potter swears, whimpers. He's noisy, demanding. He loves it when Severus touches his arse, begs for more; doesn't seem to mind his cock being ignored.

"Are you going to get undressed?" he asks, rolling them over and staring down at Severus, who must be flushed and messy, can feel his hair sticking to his face. Potter's hands are on Severus' thighs, working upwards unhurriedly. "Or do you want it just like this?" His hands find the edge of Severus' underwear, slide under, brush against his balls. Severus doesn't really understand how Potter can be so relaxed about it, as though asking what someone wants is the most natural thing in the world, as though sex were something quite everyday, quite free from shame.

He never undresses, not for this. It was circumstance and then it was habit, and why would he have wanted anyone to see his body, anyway? He has little enough going for him as it is, even with the mark gone. And besides, the dresses are—are—

But he almost wants to say yes. Roll over onto his stomach and let Potter unzip him, open the dress from neck to arse. He could almost let Potter expose him like that. He imagines Potter's lips on his back, fingers tracing the bones of his spine all the way down. Potter's mouth, Potter's tongue, opening him up. He closes his eyes.

"Leave the dress," he manages, and lifts his hips to let Potter draw his underwear away, bites back a moan when Potter bends to kiss the tip of his cock. The dress is hitched up at the front, flipped out of the way, and Potter is looking down at him with so much appreciation that he can hardly stand it.

Potter's mouth is on him, hot and messy and amazing, tongue tracing the vein on the underside of his cock, swiping over the head, and then Potter is sucking, swallowing around him, and Severus thinks about asking him to slide a finger inside his arse at the same time as he does this, about rocking back and forth between Potter's hand and his mouth, and has to yank Potter's hair to pull him back, lies there panting and struggles for control.

"OK?" Potter asks.

"You wanted—"

"Oh," Potter says. "Oh, shit, _please_."


	8. Chapter 8

Waking up is disorientating, a slow drift through strangeness—warm, why is it warm—to realisation, a sort of stunned stock-taking that he carries out lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling as if to reassure himself that he really is at home, trying to reorientate himself in his own space.

Potter is sprawled out on the bed beside him, only half under the duvet, quite entirely naked. Severus must have changed into nightclothes at some point, vaguely remembers stumbling to the bathroom some time after midnight.

It's light outside, nine o'clock at least. He should have been up two hours ago.

It's quite possible that his life is, at this point, completely out of control.

"Oh god," Potter mutters, muffled against the pillow. He hasn't moved. "Is there tea? Say there's tea." And then, jerking up into a sitting position and staring down at Severus, wincing a little as he moves—"Fuck. I had an early meeting. Hermione's going to murder me."

Severus frowns. "For the school?" It seems a strange time for it.

"No, a different thing." Potter is rubbing absently at the back of his neck. "I'm not exactly—I have a few other projects. I should probably go and put out some fires."

"I can only hope they're figurative," Severus says.

Potter grins, pulls himself out of bed. "Me too. Hey, I can—come back, right? After?"

"I don't see that I could—that is—" Severus sighs. Habit. "Yes."

"I'm not running away," Potter says. "Don't even think it."

* * *

The house still feels different. Alone in the kitchen he tests the shape of the magic flowing through it, new and unfamiliar, not the hum of well-worn old spells that he couldn't quite find it in himself to remove: something sharper, more firmly present, nothing background about it. Potter's magic is a high clear note like phoenix-song, cutting across the low groan of his own and his mothers, old magic, remnants, creaking like ice in spring.

He doesn't know what he feels about it, so he tries on resentment. Damn it, Potter has no right to come here and make him feel like this, to take care of him or forgive him or tell him to move on. It's tempting, familiar—Potter has been unspeakably presumptuous—but it doesn't quite sit right, an old winter coat that he finds he has filled out too much to feel comfortable in. He allowed Potter in, and Potter spent two months sitting by his kitchen table or curled on his sofa, drinking his tea and doing his damned best to obey Severus' rules. And Potter offered sex and Severus took it, but if he is honest—if he is honest—

If he is honest, it's not just that sex between them could never be simple. It's that the sex hardly changed anything.

It was all already there.

He sits and considers this, fumbles after any kind of sense of what to do with the information that he is genuinely fond of Harry Potter. That he's certainly enjoyed having sex with the man, even to his slight surprise found buggering him to be a deeply rewarding activity, but that when he considers what it is that he enjoys about Potter's company the first thing to come to mind is not his arse or his admittedly extremely well-formed cock but rather his earnest expression, hands curled around a cup of tea, as he steers the conversation between superhero comics and the question of separatism.

* * *

Potter doesn't come back until late afternoon—"Sorry about that, Kingsley wanted a word and then Hermione had come up with a new round of questions about how I managed to miss a meeting and then there was something about—actually, I don't even remember, but it was Luna and Draco both at once and I couldn't get them to stop talking." Dear god, no-one Potter knows ever takes time off. "I thought I'd cook."

"I do know how to feed myself," Severus points out.

Potter shrugs. "Someone's got to do it and I don't mind. You make the tea."

It isn't exactly a fair trade-off, but on the other hand, Severus always has to cook for himself, and also isn't sure if he'll be able to find anything in the kitchen now that Potter has had his way with it. He nods agreement.

Strange. He has never really considered domesticity as something one could fall into by accident, but here he is.

* * *

"You know," Potter says, later, standing beside Severus and drying dishes, "I've drunk tea with you here, and I've been out drinking with you, but I've never tried your alcohol."

It's true. Severus drinks very little at home, although that's mostly only because of his personal rule against drinking alone—hardly relevant here. "Not a very subtle hint," he says dryly.

"Not a very subtle person," Potter shoots back amiably. "Can I?"

"Go and choose a bottle, if you must," Severus says.

* * *

Potter comes back with bird-cherry. "You've got glasses?"

"We should have had this with dinner," Severus says. But he does have shot glasses, mismatched and rather chipped. "I believe one is also meant to sing before one drinks, but we'll dispense with that if it's all the same to you."

"I think I'll live," Potter says.

Severus pours two measures. "Spirits with the addition of bird-cherry blossom," he says, "are reported to have the effect of a truth drug. Not necessarily by terribly reliable sources, of course." Tobias Snape's father, specifically, who was never called Snape at all. Muggle identities are easily changed, at least on paper. So many documents were lost in that other war.

"Hmm," Potter says. His expression is amused. "I suppose we'll find out. Cheers."

* * *

"I wonder if it's doing anything," Potter says. He's taken up his favourite position, curled in the corner of the sofa. His body is loose and relaxed with the alcohol, his cheeks warm. "I wonder how I'd know. I always want to tell you—true things."

"You're quite drunk," Severus says.

"Mm," Potter agrees. "But let's just—say it's a drug. Then if I were to tell you—whatever I told you, it wouldn't be my fault."

Severus is silent. What is one to say?

"I could tell you—" Potter looks at him seriously. "I could tell you—that I never really wanted just sex. That—you really have paid them, you know, all your debts." He glances away. "That I want to know what your magic would feel like around me, in me—" he falters. "I don't think I meant to say that."

"You're drunk," Severus repeats, uselessly.

Silence.

"I cannot simply—it isn't that easy—" The words resist in his mouth. Severus closes his eyes. "It is exactly that easy. It pulls me." That is the awful thing about it.

Silence, again. Potter's eyes on him, intent. He can feel it. When he opens his eyes again, Potter doesn't look away.

"It would be like falling."

He definitely didn't mean to say that.

It is a strange feeling. Not exactly compulsion. Either of them could stop it.

Potter gets up from his seat, moves across to Severus, who is sitting in his arm-chair, turned towards the dark window, the half-drawn curtains. Severus wonders if he is about to be kissed again, but Potter lowers himself to the floor beside him—settles, warm, with his shoulder against the side of Severus' leg. "I'm sorry."

Severus breathes carefully. It is as though he is dreaming, they are dreaming. It is not a dream. It is.

He is undoubtedly just as drunk as Potter.

"I'm afraid of all sorts of things," Potter says. "Of—helplessness. People dying when I could have saved them. I still have nightmares now and then. About—the Department of Mysteries. About—" Silence. "Luna works there. I could never—" Potter shifts against him, settles closer. "The Ministry wanted executions. After the war."

He sighs.

"What are you afraid of? Severus."

Not wanting to lie, Severus does not speak for a long time.

"Myself," he says at last, closes his mouth firmly on the urge to explain, to reason. It is the truth, bare-faced. It will have to be enough.

"I'm not afraid of you," Potter says. "I could take you now, you know."

He could. He isn't a child flinging curses he hardly understands. Potter has self-assurance. Power.

"I know," Severus says, since they are telling the truth. He could die by Potter's wand. He wouldn't mind.

He manages not to say it. It is too big a truth, even for this.

And even bigger, more frightening: he could live like this, maybe. Balancing himself against Potter. It's no sort of thing to say to a person, but he holds the knowledge inside himself, turns it over, considers it.

"I really do like you, you know," Potter says.

Severus feels that he is probably very nearly smiling. But he is at least safely unseen. "Idiot."

* * *

Nothing is quite the same.

Potter does not move in. But he wakes up in Severus' bed as often as not, drinks tea too quickly in Severus' kitchen in the mornings, leaves half-eaten pieces of toast on the dresser as he rushes to get out of the house on time, leaves textbooks scattered across the floor and spare robes that he meant to take to work hanging on the bathroom door. He comes in at ten o'clock at night with paint still in his hair from a morning spent working on a new classroom even though the afternoon was spent meeting with Ministry officials or the Hogwarts board of governors. He is careless with things and deliberate with people.

He can take Severus apart with his hands, slowly and carefully or in a desperate, grasping rush. But it is never quite too much, never shattering—though he sometimes wonders what it is for Potter, what it is he's thinking when he gets that dazed expression on his face after he comes.

* * *

Severus gives him a key. "As I'm resigned to your presence, I don't see why I should have my work constantly interrupted by hammering on my door." He is rewarded by Potter crawling into his bed at two in the morning on the first of January, stretching out beside him, one hand curling possessively against his hip, murmuring things Severus probably wasn't even meant to hear, words that are almost like love.

"You're drunk, Potter," he mumbles.

"Yeah," Potter says. "It wasn't a great party. You didn't miss anything. Go back to sleep."

"Perhaps if you were to put out the lamp," Severus says, and catches Potter by the arm as he goes to get up, full of late-night resolve. "Did I say move?"

"_Oh_," Potter says, twisting to reach his wand—and then, whispered against Severus' shoulder like a caress, twisting through him like sex, "_Nox_."


	9. Chapter 9

He tries to imagine magic, what it would be like to cast with intent again: let there be light, let there be darkness, the steady feed of power into a potion and the quick hot flash of a charm. Not the sickeningly pleasurable curl of a curse deep in the gut—but that's the problem, isn't it. The knowledge of how it feels is always there, all of it, so tangled together that he doesn't know how he would begin to unravel it all.

Without Potter, he moves through his Muggle world, breathes cold winter air, retraces his usual steps and feels like a stranger. He has always been a stranger, here and there, remembers watching other children from the edge of the park, remembers hunching in the corner of the common-room with his books and listening in on conversations. At eleven years old he thought Hogwarts was going to be it, the place, the one where he finally fit, but there has been nowhere like that in his life. And the balance is not only Muggle and Magical, it is also—

"You're thinking about something," Potter says, later, curled around him on the bed, hands on Severus' chest, stroking idly over fabric.

"Mostly my own stupidity," Severus says. Potter gives a little huff of disapproval against the back of his neck, his hands still.

"Don't start," Severus says. Weighs carefully, shifting on the edge of a precipice and considering the drop. It is, perhaps, not so far down after all. Say it. _Say it_, damn you. "If you have time to consider lecturing me, you have time to undress me." He can only hope he sounds irritable. It is the only defence he can think of against the possibility that his quirks will be taken as amusing. He ought to have undressed the first time, when Potter asked—he ought never have let Potter know there was anything there to think about. There isn't anything there to think about. He just—it's only that—

Potter stills against him. "Yeah," he says. "Fuck, yeah, I can do that." His hands on Severus' back, undoing fastenings, are not terribly steady.

Severus thinks, obscurely, about vivisection, layers peeled away, spread out and pinned, internal workings exposed; shudders under Potter's touch, and then again with pleasure as Potter's hands spread warm and intimate on his lower back, ghost up his sides, down his arms. Potter murmurs indistinct words against his skin, hot and damp. Not clinical at all.

* * *

One morning, annoyed and tired, he makes the water in the kettle boil in seconds. Even children can perform wandless magic, after all; it takes training to convince them of its impossibility. He is still staring at the billowing steam in surprise when Potter sticks his head into the kitchen.

"Was that you?"

"Certainly not," Severus snaps, more disconcerted than angry. "These things just _happen_. Of course it was me."

Potter gives him an assessing look. "OK?"

That's unclear. "Of course I am."

"Good." A suppressed yawn. "How about eggs?"

* * *

It does not destroy him. Accidental magic is just the slow spillover he has lived with for years on a larger scale; will and expedience, and with his magic so long unused there is plenty of it, it is eager to please, to transform the world around it. It is as though Potter, by virtue of existing, has reminded him of something, has reminded his magic of something.

And it is reassuring, in a way, to think that this is what one does with raw power: creates a quicker path to the morning's first cup of tea. Clears one's lungs of tar in the night so that, waking, one remembers what it feels like to breathe deeply. Perhaps there is nothing inherently monstrous about magic. Not even his.

He does not touch his wand, but considers. He does not know if it would work for him now; if, having chosen, a sufficiently abused and neglected wand may reconsider its loyalties. He does not know if he wants a wand, if he wants to make that particular declaration: I exist in your world, too. To think of his wand is to think of Diagon Alley, Knockturn Alley, Hogsmeade. Hogwarts. His life now may not be the most impressive, but it is his own. His life there rarely was.

He has no map for this, is so far beyond the expected boundaries of his own post-war existence that there are no roads to be charted.

* * *

He reads. Considers Beckett, who ought after all be seen, not read; he went to see plays once or twice, some years ago. Would Potter enjoy it? Perhaps. Potter's sense of humour has at least warped somewhat with time, Severus suspects. There is in any case a certain pleasing irony to considering a departure from the physical confines of his little world here on the edge of Cokeworth for, of all things, _Waiting for Godot_.

He goes rather furtively to other, dustier shelves, too, and pulls out long-ignored texts. _A New Framework for Experimental Spellcraft_. A now rather aged treatise on the uses of Dragon's Blood—the magical sort. An original copy, signed by Albus Dumbledore. His fingers on the cover are quite steady. He will not let them shake.

Tucked behind it, pressed flat against the backboard of the bookcase where it must have been pushed decades ago, is a novel.

He pulls carefully at the little book, hooks fingers around its spine and coaxes it loose; it is wedged rather badly, the back cover and a handful of pages have slipped into a fine crack where the shelf and backboard meet.

He had a conversation with Albus, once, when he was still convinced that Albus could only ever see him as a weapon. They talked about books. They talked about Muggle literature and Wizarding classics—an argument, really—but it was a moment when things changed, and it took him another five years at least to realise.

Albus' taste in books was always baffling to him.

But here one of them is. And he had forgotten.

* * *

Potter finds him still sitting on the floor by the bookshelf when he comes in, engrossed in _The Wind Over Llanmelin_, although it is quite as florid as newly rediscovered memories told him it would be, and the characters, despite a certain amount of promising homoerotic tension, are rather flat. All the same, he is struggling not to smile, and it is only when Potter drops to his knees beside him and peers at the book in his hands that Severus realises quite how stiff his back has become.

"Having fun?" Potter asks, and from his tone Severus rather suspects him of fondness, but lets it slide.

"This book is really quite awfully written," Severus says.

"I notice you still marked your place."

"Ridiculous sentimentality," Severus says, although that ridiculous sentimentality has in fact caused him to forget his lunch. "You might at least have made me tea."

* * *

"One day," Potter says, "you'll have to come to London with me."

"You might start by telling me where you live," Severus points out dryly, although that isn't the real issue and they both know it. Appearances.

"Lambeth," Potter says, and, "Here, I'll write the whole thing down for you," and although Severus still feels a certain reluctance at the thought of London in general he knows he will plot the address, later, as though he really were entertaining the idea of Apparating down one evening, just like that.

I cannot imagine, he wants to say, what you think you're doing spending so much time with an irritable individual like me who refuses to go more than an hour's walk from his own home. But he keeps it to himself, for fear that Potter might tell him.

* * *

But he could do it, couldn't he. Think of it in theory, that's all this is, a mental exercise: Cokeworth to London is barely two hundred miles. Potter can do it over and over again. To gather himself and direct himself and to mean it. Want it.

He turns the thought over and over and sleeps badly. Potter is in London, had friends over for dinner that evening, unknown Muggles and Luna Lovegood and god help all involved. "Queer people," Potter had said with a brilliant smile. "Who knows, you might like them better than you think. It couldn't be worse than you're imagining, anyway." Severus could easily find malice there—evidence that Potter is annoyed by him or trying to make a point. Potter's gently exasperated affection is baffling.

* * *

He turns fifty-three without ceremony. Minerva sends a letter, by Muggle post: the genuine article, stamped and post-marked Edinburgh. She does this every year, and he never knows what to say, is unsure if she would like to hear from him or if she simply feels obliged to write to all the old Order members now and then.

He hasn't told Potter when his birthday is, hadn't even thought about it until the letter came. It doesn't matter, he supposes; he is not particularly attached to these sorts of dates, there have been enough of them by now and few enough have been memorable in any positive sense. As a teenager he was just glad that they fell after the start of term, when he was safely at Hogwarts. As an adult—well.

Albus' damn book was a birthday present, though, if he remembers correctly—and that at least he is beginning to be able to think fondly of again.

* * *

He is alone that evening, too, and it is only an impulse that sends him to his room, to the locked box in the back of a wardrobe; that has him fumbling it open, reaching inside.

In his hand for the first time since the break, his wand is warm and living, sends magic singing through him, wakes it and makes it living again, gives him back something that his mind had on occasion almost managed to forget, though his body never could.

This is his world, and the Muggle streets of Cokeworth are his world, too, and they don't, after all, cancel each other out. And London is, possibly, not so very far away.

It would be the easiest thing in the world to Disapparate. Like blinking, like breathing.

It is as simple as pulling on a winter coat, lacing one's boots; as curling one's fingers carefully around one's wand as if caressing it. It is as simple as feeling the flow of magic, and directing one's mind, and wanting it.

Severus thinks of Harry Potter in Lambeth, of the bottom floor flat in a hacked up Victorian red brick town-house with its own door into a tiny side-alley that could be made for Apparition. He pulls his magic around him. And he wants it.

[fin]

* * *

_End notes:_

_Thank you very much for reading! Reviews are, of course, always appreciated. I wrote this fic over a period of two months last summer, for snape_potter's First Time for Everything fest on LJ/DW/IJ; while there were no particular guidelines or prompts involved beyond the inclusion of some kind of first for the characters, I wanted to write a story about Snape becoming able to reconcile his magical and muggle heritage for the first time. A lot of other firsts seem to have happened on the way, too, although they aren't necessarily flagged up as such!_

_The title of this story is from the song _Shoreline_ by Broder Daniel._

_The (Muggle) books & stories read in this fic are, in order of first appearance:_

_Tove Jansson - The True Deceiver_  
_James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room_  
_Arthur Conan Doyle - The Master Blackmailer_  
_Sebastian Faulks – Birdsong_  
_Samuel R Delany - Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand_  
_Jean Genet - Our Lady of the Flowers_  
_Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot_

_For the curious and Swedish-speaking among you, the alcohol traditions referenced here are fetched primarily from two sources:_

_Lindberg, Erik Jonas (1986). _Tugga beck, slå blod, skåda i brännvin: om folkliga huskurer och medicinsk magi_. Stockholm: Prisma_

_Sjögren, Bengt (1975). _Brännvinskryddor i skog & mark_. Stockholm: Norstedts_

_The latter is a practical guide to producing flavoured brännvin, accompanied by some background folklore from all over northern Europe, while the former is a collection of folk medicine and magic from Jämtland, and contains plenty of marvelously strange gems._


End file.
